White supremacist groups and their networks across the globe are manipulating social media to suppress the votes of Black Americans in critical swing states in the presidential election this November.

Dear MoveOn member,

White supremacist groups and their networks across the globe are manipulating social media to suppress the votes of Black Americans in critical swing states in the presidential election this November.

Their strategy threatens to disenfranchise huge numbers of Black voters. It should scare the living daylights out of you.

In 2016, Russian agents created networks of social media puppet accounts that impersonated Black activists and infiltrated communities of Black residents in the crucial swing state of Michigan. As Election Day neared, those accounts spread disinformation to "confuse, distract, and ultimately discourage" Black voters from turning out.¹

The Mueller report revealed that 70,000 Black Democratic voters in Michigan stayed home on Election Day as a result of these disinformation campaigns.² Trump won Michigan by only 10,000 votes.³

Disinformation campaigns—efforts to deliberately spread false information on social media in order to suppress Democratic votes—work. And they helped hand Trump the White House in 2016.

This election season, disinformation campaigns are even MORE sophisticated—which is why MoveOn is investing big in working to take down fake, racist accounts.

We have hired expert digital detectives who will track disinformation networks online, follow the threads to their source, expose their impact, and pressure social media platforms like Facebook to take them down.

But to pull this off, we need a steady stream of funding for the rest of the year to pay for the staff time and resources needed to ensure these networks don't impact the election results.

Join our sleuthing squad and help dismantle the disinformation networks working to re-elect Trump by chipping in $3 today.

Due to the ongoing threats from the coronavirus pandemic, most traditional in-person strategies for voter turnout are off the table.

That means that this election will be won or lost online. If we allow fake accounts to spread disinformation on social media and suppress votes, hundreds of thousands of voters may be dissuaded from going to the ballot box in the critical battleground states, allowing Trump to cheat his way to a second term.

But if we all pitch in to take down these fake, racist accounts, then we have a real shot at defeating Trump and the GOP this November.

Here’s just some of what we have planned:

• Track and take down networks that are working to spread lies, demobilize and intimidate Democratic voters, and make it harder to vote. MoveOn has hired an investigations team that is working behind the scenes to track disinformation networks targeting Democratic voters to demobilize and intimidate them. When we find those networks, we will mobilize to force Facebook to remove them, which will also get rid of most of the content they shared and prevent other voters from being exposed to it.
• Live-monitor disinformation being spread during key political moments. As Election Day nears, right-wing social media accounts will begin spreading conspiracy theories about the polling locations, voting hours, and voter rolls, as well as lies about vote-by-mail in order to disenfranchise voters. Our research team will live-monitor the spread of disinformation to help better track the networks behind these lies and will work to quickly take them down.
• Run pressure campaigns to demand that Facebook and other social media companies take action. Facebook's current policy expressly allows political candidates like Trump to run blatantly false ads, like the "Super Predators" ad he ran in 2016 to suppress the Black vote. But Facebook cannot continue to skirt its responsibility for providing a platform for these lies to spread. We MUST get Facebook and other social media corporations to change their policies and take down fake, racist accounts that suppress our votes.

The potential impact from our work is ENORMOUS, and it could quite literally ensure that Trump FINALLY loses on November 3.

But in order to fully execute our plan and make it successful, we need your help.

Will you help us fully fund this campaign so we ensure that Trump is not propelled to another victory through fake, racist, and xenophobic disinformation campaigns? Chip in $3 today.

The tragic murders of Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and too many others have brought the reality of systemic racism in policing to the forefront of our national consciousness. And the disproportionate number of deaths in the Black community caused by the coronavirus pandemic demonstrates the effects of racism on our health care system. But the police and medical systems aren't the only institutions plagued by entrenched, systemic racism.

In our political system, one of the most vile and time-honored ways racism rears its ugly head is through voter suppression.

You can help protect the rights of Black voters by helping dismantle the racist disinformation networks that directly attacked Black voter rights in 2016 and helped propel Trump to the White House.

Times are tough in this economy, and not everyone is in a position to give, but if you can, every single dollar could make the difference on November 3, 2020.

Pitch in $3 today.

Thanks for all you do.

–Ann, Natalie, Kate, Anne, and the rest of the team

Sources:

1. "Russian propagandists targeted African Americans to influence 2016 US election," The Guardian, December 17, 2018
https://act.moveon.org/go/137378?t=6&akid=266127%2E40999114%2EyAaguR

2. "Election experts endorse Cory Booker’s explanation for Trump winning Michigan," ThinkProgress, August 3, 2019
https://act.moveon.org/go/137379?t=8&akid=266127%2E40999114%2EyAaguR

3. "Michigan Results," The New York Times, August 1, 2017
https://act.moveon.org/go/116392?t=10&akid=266127%2E40999114%2EyAaguR

Want to support our work? The MoveOn community will work every moment, day by day and year by year, to resist Trump's agenda, contain the damage, defeat hate with love, and begin the process of swinging the nation's pendulum back toward sanity, decency, and the kind of future that we must never give up on. And to do it we need your support, now more than ever. Will you stand with us?

Click here to chip in $3, or whatever you can afford.

PAID FOR BY MOVEON.ORG POLITICAL ACTION, http://pol.moveon.org/. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

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